Congressional Power - The versailles era

That said, the League of Nations fight represented the most significant
foreign policy confrontation between Congress and the executive in the
first half of the twentieth century. It is ironic that failure to obtain
Senate approval of the Treaty of Versailles plays such a role in Woodrow
Wilson's historical legacy, because, in his first six years in
office, Wilson had compiled a record at managing Congress unmatched by any
chief executive since Thomas Jefferson. Using adept political skills,
effective management of the Democratic caucus, and a keen ability to
articulate his political vision to the public, Wilson had managed to push
through Congress not one but two comprehensive reform packages. His record
on foreign policy matters was slightly less stellar, but, nonetheless,
given the complexity of the issues he confronted—not only the Great
War but also the Mexican Revolution—he performed impressively.

By handing control of Congress to the Republicans, however, the 1918
midterm elections elevated Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge to the
dual position of Senate majority leader and chair of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee. Personal and partisan animus shaded Lodge's
response to Wilson. Before Wilson's arrival on the national scene,
Lodge (who, like Wilson, held a Ph.D. degree) had been the nation's
most prominent scholar in politics. Lodge, who matched Wilson's
partisanship, also recognized that the treaty's unamended passage
would benefit the Democrats politically. The senator confronted a problem,
however: the League of Nations seemed popular, and opinion among his
Republican colleagues was badly divided. A few Republican senators, such
as William Borah and Robert La Follette, opposed entering the league under
any circumstances, primarily because they believed that European
imperialist powers would dominate the organization. "Mild
reservationists," such as senators William Kenyon and Porter
McCumber, supported the treaty with only minor changes. Most Republicans
joined Lodge in classifying themselves as "strong
reservationists," a vague designation that amounted to outright
opposition to the league as constructed by Wilson.

The treaty reached the Senate in the spring of 1919. Lodge's
performance between then and the first vote on the document in November
1919 provided a textbook example of how a congressional minority could use
the institution's powers to alter U.S. foreign policy. Lodge began
by convening lengthy hearings on the treaty, which gave the Republicans
time to influence public opinion. But the hearings also exposed the many
provisions in the Versailles Treaty in which diplomatic necessities had
forced Wilson to compromise his ideals. As the summer progressed,
criticism of the treaty escalated, from a wide variety of
groups—ethnic Americans, especially of Irish ancestry, who saw the
document as a sellout to the British; radicals and anti-imperialists, who
viewed the treaty as a betrayal of American ideals; and nationalists, who
worried that the collective security mechanism of Article X would rob
Congress of its constitutional right to declare war. As a Senate critic,
Lodge did not need to propose a positive alternative; he only had to
ensure that one-third plus one of the members of the Senate would vote
against approval. His determination, along with Wilson's equally
passionate refusal to compromise and the parliamentary tactics of the
Senate irreconcilables (the outright opponents of the league), paved the
way for three Senate votes in which the upper chamber rejected the Treaty
of Versailles and thus U.S. membership in the League of Nations.

The defeat of the Versailles Treaty confirmed the breakdown between
Woodrow Wilson and the new Republican majority. But even before the 1918
elections, relations between the two branches had deteriorated. Before the
U.S. entrance into World War I, the president was subjected to consistent
barbs from Senate progressives for both his Mexican and his preparedness
policies. Then, in 1918, Wilson confronted the dilemma of Congress
exercising a prior restraint over his response to the Bolshevik
Revolution: fear of a congressional investigation blocked a scheme to
supply credits to Admiral Aleksandr Vasiliyevich Kolchak's
antirevolutionary forces. When Wilson attempted to bypass Congress
entirely by sending troops to Russia, the body employed the ultimate
sanction: its power of the purse. In 1919 a resolution introduced by
Senator Hiram Johnson to cut off funding for the intervention failed on a
perilously close tie vote. This demonstration of the critical spirit in
Congress convinced the administration that it had no choice but to
withdraw the armed forces.

The intensity of the Versailles and Russian battles heightened the
importance of foreign policy pressure groups of all ideological
persuasions. The pattern continued during the 1920s, especially on
military and Latin American issues. As would be the case later in the
century as well, such groups tended to influence Congress more than the
executive. In 1926, for instance, the U.S. Army's Chemical Warfare
Service waged a highly effective lobbying campaign to prevent Senate
approval of the Chemical Weapons Treaty, while anti-imperialists and peace
groups helped soothe the U.S.–Mexican crisis of 1926–1927.
In turn, the greater public interest in foreign policy highlighted the
ability of Congress, especially the Senate, to frame consideration of
international questions, especially at a time when political reporters
spent as much time covering events in the Senate as they did at the White
House.

No figure made better use of this environment than William Borah.
Combining his power as Foreign Relations Committee chair with his
long-standing identification with the issue, Borah positioned himself as
the chief interpreter of the 1929 Kellogg-Briand Pact to outlaw war. He
also launched his own venture in private diplomacy in an attempt to
prevent a military conflict with Mexico. Those executive initiatives that
cleared Congress during the 1920s, such as the Washington Naval Conference
treaties of 1921–1922, further confirmed the legislature's
influence: the treaties overcame strong Senate opposition largely because
the Harding administration appointed two prominent senators, Henry Cabot
Lodge and Oscar Underwood to the U.S. negotiating team. When Secretary of
State Frank Kellogg proved less willing to involve Congress in his Latin
American policy—during his tenure the United States sent marines to
Nicaragua without congressional sanction and nearly severed diplomatic
relations with Mexico—the legislature responded in kind: in 1929
the Senate passed an amendment authored by C. C. Dill to terminate
appropriations for the U.S. intervention in Nicaragua.

The Dill Amendment was the handiwork of the peace progressives, one of the
most effective congressional blocs of the twentieth century. Although
never more than twelve in the Senate, members of the group displayed
remarkable acumen in advancing their ideological agenda. They first
attracted notice in the 1910s, when senators such as Borah, La Follette,
and George Norris offered an anti-imperialist, antimilitarist critique of
Wilson's foreign policy. But the peace progressives made their mark
in the 1920s, when they used the Senate's traditional tolerance of
dissenters to influence the foreign policy of the Harding, Coolidge, and
Hoover administrations. Their tactics included appropriations riders,
public hearings to influence popular opinion, covert cooperation with
peace groups to leak embarrassing information, and using the prestige of
their positions to cement transnational alliances with like-minded groups
and individuals overseas. By the end of the 1920s, U.S. policy toward
Central America and the Caribbean had moved strongly in an
anti-imperialist direction.

And so, as the framers anticipated, foreign policy issues remained
vigorously contested between the branches. This framework continued during
the first several years of Franklin Roosevelt's administration. A
domestic focus made Roosevelt reluctant to spend political capital on
international matters, such as the protocol for adherence to the World
Court—one reason why the Senate defeated the treaty. A leading
opponent of the World Court was the peace progressive senator Gerald Nye,
who, like many in the group, believed that pressure from munitions makers
and bankers explained Wilson's decision to bring the country into
World War I. In the throes of the Great Depression, a conspiracy theory
against business carried a good deal of weight, and, when Nye opened
hearings on the matter in 1934–1935, the affair attracted national
attention. Secretary of State Cordell Hull complained how the Nye
Committee's dominance of discourse on neutrality issues
strengthened isolationist sentiments. Indeed, as the secretary
anticipated, the hearings resulted in Congress passing the Neutrality Acts
of 1935 and 1936. Ironically, during Franklin Roosevelt's first six
years as president, the most important diminution of congressional
authority on foreign policy issues came with the Reciprocal Trade
Agreements Act of 1934, when Congress willingly surrendered its power over
foreign economic policy as part of the fallout from the Smoot-Hawley
tariff.

Despite differences between eras, some common patterns emerged in the
congressional approach to international relations between 1789 and 1941.
The Dill and Hiram Johnson resolutions, for example, showed how powerfully
military appropriations bills could influence foreign affairs. The
prevalence of treaties, even though the upper chamber approved 86 percent
of the 726 treaties it considered between 1789 and 1926, heightened the
importance of formal roll-call votes in assuring at least some senatorial
presence in the conduct of foreign policy. With the (albeit important)
exception of tariffs, the House of Representatives played a minor role on
international questions. (During one congressional session in the 1920s,
for instance, the House Foreign Affairs Committee spent a week debating a
$20,000 appropriation for an international poultry show in Tulsa, which
one member recalled as the committee's most important issue of the
whole session.) In the Senate, meanwhile, the Foreign Relations Committee
reigned supreme. The upper chamber's considerable international
powers fell under the control of a relatively small foreign policy elite,
composed of Foreign Relations members and the few other
senators—like the peace progressives—who exhibited intense
interest in international matters.

The international threat associated with World War II altered this
alignment. Perhaps no single piece of legislation highlighted the change
more than the Lend-Lease Act of 1940, which passed despite knowledge that
it would lessen congressional control over foreign policy. During World
War II, determined to avoid the mistakes of the Wilson administration,
Roosevelt hoped to place the Senate on record supporting U.S.
participation in a postwar international organization. But the president
did not want Congress to play an active role in forming postwar foreign
policy. He strongly opposed the so-called B2H2 resolution (abbreviated for
its sponsors—Senators Harold Burton, Joseph Ball, Lister Hill, and
Carl Hatch), which called for the United States to join a postwar
international police force. Working with Senate leaders, the
administration instead championed a vaguely worded offering that praised
the work of Cordell Hull at the 1943 Moscow Conference of foreign
ministers. This was the first in a series of measures in which Congress
was asked to provide advance authority for future executive action.
Moreover, as would occur with similar postwar resolutions, the political
and international conditions under which the Senate considered the
substitute—after Hull had already completed his work—made it
almost impossible to oppose the bill without repudiating executive
commitments.